84 CREATIVE SELF-EXPRESSION
theatre sends a delegate to the Theatre Delegates' Conference.
This discusses every aspect of any play produced. It agitates
for greater interest in, and support for, the children's theatre
among their schoolfellows, parents, and factory workers.
Children come from schools on an average once a month. The
price of tickets is nominal, and those who cannot afford that
either come free, or are helped by the School Aid Committee.
Plays are arranged for age groups. Natalie Satz admits children
at the age of six to special plays. The other theatres do not admit
them until eight years old. For those under eight they have
puppet theatres, which are very joyous affairs, if my experience
of them, particularly in the Kharkov Children's Theatre, is a
fair sample. All kinds of plays are now produced—Soviet plays,
classical plays, selected fairy-tales, and foreign plays. Makaryev,
the rSgisseur of the Leningrad Children's Theatre, hopes to
produce Shakespeare for the children. Before doing so he in-
tended to study Shakespeare and his epoch for a couple of years,
and the Society for Cultural Relations with the U.S.S.R.,
through its members, has been instrumental in sending him a
considerable amount of Shakespearean material for that purpose.
It might interest English producers and actors to learn that it
takes nearly a year, working fairly continuously, to produce a
new play for the children, That will give the measure of the
seriousness of this movement. There are now nearly a hundred
children's theatres in the U.S.S.R.
Just as there are special theatres for the children, so there are
special cinemas. Children under sixteen are not allowed into
adult theatres or cinemas, though this is not an unbroken law.
There are at present 45 special children's cinemas in the Union,
for which the Cinema Trust has to produce special films. There
are also 4,000 sets of school cinema apparatus. Even radio
stations are separate for children. There are 140 of these. My
experience of some of the 2,000 school radio sets does not make
E$e a wireless enthusiast. Most of the instruments that I heard
m the schools were very bad, and the children were apparently
m «se$ to the mise that came out of them during lunch that they